Hey,
Looking for some advice on which HBA I need to get, ideally I need to provide 8 sas connections to my Jonsbo N3’s backplane. The smaller in size the better since I will be using a m.2 to pcie adapter. There are other ways round it but realistically I want to keep my GPU in there and space is limited. Fortunately my motherboard (Gigabyte Z590 Vision D ITX) has a PCIe 3x4 M.2 slot on the back side of the motherboard so I would like to make use of it.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Honestly?
Drop the Jonsbo N3, your high-end mini-ITX consumer motherboard which is much more suited to a desktop, and get a Fractal Design Node 804 and a micro-ATX motherboard, preferably server-grade.
At least two PCIe slots, space to work with, good cooling (something which will NOT come easy with two single slot half-height cards crammed into a N3), and no convoluted adapters. Easy life.
Mini-ITX can only get you so far.
I hear what your saying but realistically I want to work with what I’ve got plus I plan on using a vm to play games in windoze. The cooling so far has been perfectly acceptable for my use so far. This isn’t my main nas just something I want to play around with. The brutal reality is a rack mounted setup wins every time but isn’t practical.
The IOMMU Groups on that Motherboard might not be suitable for a GPU passthrough to a windows VM.
Thats a very valid point I will check my setups IOMMU groups to see if the GPU is in it’s own group. Thanks.
After checking it appears my GPU is in its own IOMMU group and I am pretty sure I’ve had it working on unRAID in the past if my memory serves me right.
If you need SAS and not SATA, all the 8i LSI HBAs I have ever seen are the same form factor, half height half length and require cooling airflow.
And those who are not HHHL PCIe cards come in proprietary form factors with proprietary connectors…
Purely out of curiosity, what’s the point of gaming in a VM hosted by a storage server, and which single slot GPU is considered “suitable for gaming”? (Because anything bigger will take the space you want for a HBA…)
It’s not a single slot GPU its a RTX 4060, the only reason for gaming in a vm would be to save me having to shut it down and load up in to windows. Just because I want to use a PCIe HBA doesn’t mean it needs to sit in a PCIe placement in the case hence the M.2 to PCIe adapter. I have plenty or space for a HBA in the lower compartment of the came and it is directly next to 2 exhaust fans so heat isn’t really going to be a problem. The PCIe bracket will be removed on any HBA I get since I will only be using internal ports it would only be a blank anyway.
